Advancing Public Trust Relationships in Electronic Government: The Singapore E-Filing Journey

E‐governments have become an increasingly integral part of the virtual economic landscape. However, e‐government systems have been plagued by an unsatisfactory, or even a decreasing, level of trust among citizen users. The political exclusivity and longstanding bureaucracy of governmental institutions have amplified the level of difficulty in gaining citizens' acceptance of e‐government systems. Through the synthesis of trust‐building processes with trust relational forms, we construct a multidimensional, integrated analytical framework to guide our investigation of how e‐government systems can be structured to restore trust in citizen‐government relationships. Specifically, the analytical framework identifies trust‐building strategies (calculative‐based, prediction‐based, intentionality‐based, capability‐based, and transference‐based trust) to be enacted for restoring public trust via e‐government systems. Applying the analytical framework to the case of Singapore's Electronic Tax‐Filing (E‐Filing) system, we advance an e‐government developmental model that yields both developmental prescriptions and technological specifications for the realization of these trust‐building strategies. Further, we highlight the impact of sociopolitical climates on the speed of e‐government maturity.